So I had really good intentions about writing every day since in the past putting my thoughts down was a way for me to reflect, but then I was sick, not an excuse exactly, but I felt like garbage and writing ceased to become a priority in my life. We're closing on the condo on the 31st, I'd love to move in right away, but November 9th will come soon enough. I found a great website that had several recipes I want to try. I need to feed people who are helping me move, and I need to do this on a slim budget so I went to Google in search of healthy recipes for the frugally inclined. I have a thrifty streak, but I'm also a spender, that's something I need to work on, and I need a plan so I can get where I need to be. The other thing I found on this site were instructions for growing your own salad greens in a container, bonus for me since I already have salad mix seeds. I just love plants and green growing things, they represent an essence of life I miss when they're not around.

A friend of mine with an Amazon prime account ordered me the book Fit For Life. It was $4, and I consider it money well spent despite my need to conserve right now. The plan is simple, it will take some adapting since we need to be gluten free, but since the author is vegetarian, very few recipes call for dairy products. There are recipes that include meat, but I'm going to do my best to treat it like many Asian cultures do, and serve it as an accent instead of giving it top billing. I've found some lovely recipes right here on E2, and I can not wait for a kitchen where I'm the boss, and what I say goes. The other book I checked out from the library that was interesting is Food Matters. It's written for people with a fair amount of kitchen experience (in my opinion), but I took a lot away from it, but not nearly as much as I got out Fit For Life. There's a second edition of Fit For Life that I'd like to order eventually, but now that I have the philosophy down, I'll be content with what I have.

After three weeks of fasting I felt hungry so I had a couple ounces of grapefruit juice. The experience was unpleasant, so I went back to the fasting protocol, and now feel much better although I am very tired today. It's a very strange feeling to see food, want to eat it, but get messages from your body that now is not the time. The time will come, I am sure of that, and in the meantime, I'm so gratified to have teeth that feel perpetually clean, clearer eyes and skin, I can see healthier skin beneath my finger and toenails, I've lost weight, that's the least exciting part of the fast because I haven't lost much body fat so I still retain the same shape, but that too is a process so I'm not frustrated. This morning I took a walk, a bath, and a nap. I have other things I could be doing, but I made the decision to take care of myself first, and I have no regrets.

Several of my Twitter friends and I exchange emails. Today I found a gorgeous letter of encouragement from someone. I wanted to cry it was so beautifully written, it gave me strength to go out for a walk when I wanted to crawl back to my nice warm bed. My husband's uncle said he had a bed for me. It turned out to be a mattress instead of a full bed, so now I have to decide if I want a queen sized bed, or a twin one. I'm leaning towards a single bed right now. I love space and light and that would give me more room for my plants and my desk if I decide that I have enough room for it in my room. I could also sleep in the bunk beds when the girls are at my place, and the couch when they're not. That's less than ideal, but I could make it work if I had to. I'd like to be able to walk to work on days when I don't work at the restaurant. It's almost three miles which shouldn't be a problem, and the majority of the way is sidewalks that should be clear during snowy days.

Walking to work would require a new pair of boots, but for what I'd save in gas and wear and tear on my car, I could buy some really nice boots that would keep my feet warm and dry. Right now I'm being a bit of a baby about not wanting to walk back home in the dark. I need to make up my mind that this is important enough for me to do, and just commit to it. I wouldn't have had a choice in the matter several hundred years ago, and they didn't have North Face or Columbia products to keep people warm back then either. My mom has agreed to help me move. I wish she'd offer to help me pack or make something to serve the movers, but my husband has a point when he says I've rebuffed her in the past so what do I expect? She's the way that she is, and I need to finally make peace with the past. Although my husband and I have been getting along better in some respects, in other ways things are still not optimal. He was critical of the way I handled a situation with my oldest daughter and sent me a text to let me know that while I had a plan he would put money on it being ineffective. Poorly executed was his choice of words, in the past I would have tried to defend myself, this time I let the text ride.

I can't remember if I talked about starting a new book in my last daylog. If I have, then this is slightly redundant news, but the cool part is I'm getting close to some really naked personal issues, and that's been really cool. I can listen to the same song over and over, those songs rarely make it into my writing, but there's something about the emotions and lyrics and passion that help me write. When I was a preteen and later a teenager, I made so much fun of love songs. There weren't many I liked, and now that I'm more mature, I know that it is an act of courage and bravery to put your heart out like that. Periodically I will get DM's from people on Twitter who tell me that I've inspired them. That usually affects me since some of these people I rarely interact with, but it's so rewarding to know that there are others who respond to my ramblings in 140. For me, the medium doesn't matter. I meet people at the grocery store, the thrift store, work, anywhere I go really. It's a gift of mine that I network like a natural. I just wish I had a better way to monetize that skill.

I've been taking the girls to church on Monday nights intead of trying to get them out of bed on Sunday mornings. I love having them sit next to me because they're always more loving and affectionate when it's just the three of us sitting in the pew together. We've been better about putting money in the plate, the girls have envelopes they typically forget. For many things that haven't gone well at home, I'm sincerely sorry I wasn't the type of mother I wanted to be, or the one that they maybe needed at times. I can't dwell on the past, I can take steps to make sure that the future addresses some of these shortcomings, and let's face it, regardless of what I do, I'll never be perfect, and neither will they. I've become a very autocratic parent, my parents were like that which is where I learned it, I was better when I took the Love and Logic parenting course, it's just a matter of me practicing empathy whenever I speak to others. Shouldn't be difficult, but it takes a conscious effort on my part.

There's a lot more on my mind, but that's it for now.

Until next time,

Jess

I outed you years ago re: your big heart. You were slightly embarrassed, then. You'd probably be twice as embarrassed now to read all the stuff that's being said about you today, but it's mostly true, and you were loved, and you will be missed. I haven't written anything here in well over a year. You ought to be pleased with yourself in that only your passing could have prompted me to contribute anything else. I'd ask for your forgiveness in that it is a mere daylog instead of an actual contribution, but we both know it would be disingenuous of me to do so. Besides, I'm kind of mad at you for up and dying on me.

Goodbye, old man. I'll never forget you.

My friend has died.

We knew each other through this site for about 14 years. We didn't like each other at first. I was a liberal, he was a conservative, we fought like hell. For a long, damn time, we fought like hell. I hated him, he hated me, the war would never end.

And at some point, almost at the same time, we started exchanging messages. I don't remember which of us sent the first one. But we decided we were tired of hating each other, and it was time to try being friends instead. 

We still fought some. We still hated each other's politics. I thought he was a bit too rough on some users sometimes. But we were friends a hell of a lot more often.

We were editors at the same time. He got the rep as the Mean Editor, which was not fair, because I was probably at least as brutal as he was with the nuke button, maybe even more so. But our friendship was forged in the fire of Beating the Shit Out of Bad Writeups and Trollish Newbies, and that's a damn fine way for a friendship to get forged. Some of y'all got pissed about that, and honestly, we didn't care. We laughed and laughed about it, because every nuke was righteous, and every complaint was music to our ears. We were goddamn sons of bitches, but we were goddamn sons of bitches for the benefit of this site we both loved, and you'd never have convinced either of us we were wrong. 

I wrote Dannye Boy for him. The first reading I ever did for an E2 podcast was of his Only child: Downside because, well, I can't remember why. Because I loved it, mostly. I always kinda wanted to read his All the gold you can eat, but I've never been brave enough to try it. I'm quite sure I'd be weeping long before the end. 

When he told me he really liked one of my writeups, or something I recorded for the podcast, I knew I'd really done a damn good job. Those were good days. Just goddamn good days. 

Almost every time he'd add a new writeup, I'd be amazed at just how good a writer he was. He was a crotchety old son of a bitch, but goddamn, he wrote like a house on fire. Go read his top-rated writeups. Go read them and be astounded. You'd forgotten he was that good, didn't you? I'd forgotten, and then he'd remind me with a new writeup. Like a house on fire. 

We finally started exchanging the occasional phone call in the last few years, after he learned he was sick. He sent me an ancient childhood toy, just because he wanted me to have it. I've set it up in my cubicle, among a bunch of goofy action figures, and I think of him every time I see it. I don't know what it'll be like to see it now. But I won't move it or hide it. He sent it because he wanted me to have it, and I love getting to think of him.

My friend has died. And I'm damned, damned tired of my friends dying.

Well, shit.

I really don't even know what to say. This, for me, is not normal, but this isn't about me.

Others have said it better, already. I think dannye's main opinion of me was one of exasperation; a feeling that "this liberal shit can do better than he's doing, and he ain't."

I think that was his opinion of many of us, and as others have said before, that's one of the things that we'll miss most - that assumption that there was someone on E2 shaking his head at you in disappointment or just plain ornery annoyance - and once in a great while, we would rewrite our crap, raise the bar, earn our bullshit, whatever, just so we could flip him the bird from behind an offering we weren't as ashamed of.

I'm mostly sad I never got to meet him. We talked about it, a few times; but I think we knew it was unlikely to happen. It would mean disturbing that essential relationship of "for fuck's sake, kid."

I think if anything, he'd be proud that his passing on lifted the 'Other Users' list to levels it hasn't seen in quite a while, with names that haven't signed in in years. But at the same time, I think he'd say "if that's what it takes, this place is fucked."

Whether he's right or wrong, it doesn't detract from the statement the wake makes; it doesn't detract from the the fact that a crowd of imaginary internet whackjobs is going to miss the hell out of him.

See you when I see you, brother. Hold a drink for me.

I started writing this node hours and hours ago and it was very difficult because it was hard to clearly see the screen.

Big, heaving, wretched sobs.

But the eyes dry out and the jaw aches and there is nothing else to do in the middle of the night and I can't sleep. And if I did, what should I dream?

 
(If what follows is all very discombobulated I apologize. Such is 5 AM.)

 
Here is the awful truth: I have a half-written node on my hard drive which I started to write when I saw his own last node. I don't know how many people noticed, but it was terribly confused when first posted, only clarified through many edits over the day. I realized then that there was a terrible danger we might not have him long. I started to write something that he would have time to read, I wanted to tell him the truth — that he had enriched my life, that by living, he had made my life better, and I will be grateful to him always! — but I felt like it would be a morbid, unwelcome thing for him to see, so I chickened out.

It took pretty near exactly a month to realize exactly how much of an idiot that makes me.

 
Dannye was one of the best writers ever to put anything on this site and probably the best editor, especially in the proper sense as opposed to the local secondary, »writeup tidier guy«. Besides all of which he actually gave a shit about the site per se, unlike many others I might mention, who left and, caring only about their own hurt feelings, took their writeups with them when they went. He sneered at these people and did so justly.

Is it right that someone should pule and mumble when telling you what's wrong with your work? Scrape their foot in the dirt and mutter something apologetic? Of course not! They didn't fuck up; YOU fucked up. You. It was your fault, you did it, and whoever helped you didn't owe you shit but you got help anyway, so act grateful, dammit. But, of course, no, many of you didn't do that, because you think you're entitled to be treated as though you're goddamn Marie Antoinette along with your free improvements, and a slice of strawberry cake too, no doubt. That's all pretty bad already, but then to act like he was just inscrutably cantankerous — haha, no reason! — that just takes the cake. (Which you're not getting, by the way. You get shown the head of Madame de Lamballe, that's what you get, and that's what you deserve for building a little fake hamlet where you could hide from the world.)

O world that has no home for sanity! O mankind that likes the semblance of good better than the good, that prefers sycophancy to honesty, or even truth! Every loss like this one is a terrible injury. We have so many egotists with thin skins; we had so few like him already. It isn't right that we should lose him; he should have lived to be a hundred. He should have golfed on Mars. (If he damn well felt like it.)

But here we are, poor souls, and poorer now.

 
Our brother has gone ahead of us into the other world. It is my sincere hope that when we meet him there, the bar will be terribly high, and this time you will all be wise enough to love him for it.

When I heard from Jet-Poop that dannye had passed away, I had to stop and let that sink in for a bit.

I've known him for quite a long while, though not as long as many of the names that now crowd the catbox. Perhaps because I was also an older noder, I always got along well with the crusty old coot. I remember talking to him on the phone, listening to how he hated Microsoft Windows and what a pain it was. I remember sending him an updated copy of Windows to install on his computer, and that he was pleased with the outcome. We would chat about life in general, about how much he enjoyed just sitting and watching the view as the busy world rushed by, and how silly and uptight the noders could be here on E2.

I hadn't talked to him in a while, although I knew he had some medical issues going on. Family always came first with him, even when he knew he was not going to be around for long. We ribbed each other over nodes, we laughed as the trolls and the crap nodes were purged with a side order of Klaproth's ire, and we discussed the immense talent that was buried here and there, diamonds amongst the quartz.

I can tell you he was very, very proud of most of you, whom he considered his kids. Loud, raucous, obnoxious kids, but he loved you all.

I'm not ashamed to admit there are tears on my face as I write this, but it's time to get off the old man's lawn.

Godspeed, my friend. You will be remembered.

God speed, you cranky old bastard. Don't let those winged jerks push you around.

 

Claw, fiercely, and hug boldly, the last wisp of a friend as they pass.

Wrestle the scent of their spirit, the pressure of their discontent, the grey from their head,

lest nostalgia steal it all,

and swap them with a smiling doppelganger.

I got teary-eyed when I heard. I hate you and love you for being so harsh on me when I first joined this site. I hope for our sakes that you're somewhere having a beer on ice with Sensei. We'll miss you you old kook--more than you know.

Well, shit

I wouldn't always have believed it, had someone told me I would one day shed tears over dannye. I would have been wrong.

Like a fucking decade ago now, I once had dinner with dannye. He was in town for business and asked if I'd like to meet. I wasn't going to say no. I was to meet him at his hotel, anxious because although by then we'd worked together on the editing staff here for years, this guy was the equivalent of my hardest, harshest English professor, never quite satisfied with anything I did; always, always smarter than me; and never quit forcing me fiercely, relentlessly toward better work.

I knew I was nervous but it didn't occur to me until walking down the hotel hallway that I was FUCKING TERRIFIED, because DANNYE, but then there was his unexpectedly open door, and inside it this guy I had lionized for years, lying on his back on the bed, sipping whiskey and watching tv. I did a timid little knock-knock and he gestured toward the paper cup on the nightstand. Drink?

Easy as that. I didn't digest this particular lesson for years, but when it sank in, god it was handy. Approach a stranger with the assumption you're going to get along like gangbusters.

And we did. Our differences managed to fuck off and we had the best time eating shrimp. We talked for hours and laughed a lot; I remember he performed certain unexpected gentlemanly gestures re opening doors and pulling out my chair. Unexpected from anyone, certainly from this person I was used to thinking of as a certain special kind of difficult. And he was that. But he was a lot of other things as well.

I put e2 on an equal par with college with regards to what taught me to write, and maybe my education as a whole. Dannye was a fundamental part of it. I don't think I realized I considered him a professor until today. God, what a fucking crab he could be, what a talent, what a funny fierce singular guy.


Make of these what you will:

A year and a half ago, dannye sent me this image, without comment, titled "My Baby Cow Saying hi to my Baby Deer." http://imgur.com/8YDj4#.T2FGEOscgG4.email 


2005.03.03 at 04:24 dannye says Well, my cornbread just got done and I'm going to eat dinner and sleep in my own bed with my own wife for a while. Take some Vitamin C and hope it doesn't last long. 'nite.


2005.05.10 at 22:22 dannye says This is something that should have happened to you: I'm walking my dog (2 miles on a hot day) just now and there are two little girls selling lemonade for a dime near my house. I want to buy some on the way but have no money. On the way back, they want me to buy some as badly as I now want and need a drink of it. But, again, I say, "Sorry, I have no pockets nor money. How long are you going to be here?" (I'll get a drink then go home and bring them money back.) "Just a couple of minutes more."

Oh, well. I walk on. Less than half a block later, I see pennies lying on the ground. Guess how many? I pick the ten pennies up and walk back for my drink. Is that spooky weird or what? Ten pennies just lying there in the street. I've never seen more than one penny lying on the ground anywhere in my entire life.

 

For the last couple of years fully half his intermittent messages to me were reminders that I needed to read Mark Helprin. He was right.

 

We were arguing over some edit I'd made; he didn't so much disagree with my choice, as think I was being silly to bother with it at all. Here is the last message he ever sent me:

dannye says I think you need to find something more worthwhile to do w/ your time.

Klaproth says "I ate your write up (I forget which one). I could have eaten a box of Alpha Bits and crapped out something better. Your write up now rests in node heaven”.

Or something like that.

I first started writing here a little over twelve years ago and didn’t have a clue as to what was going on and man, was I insulted when Klaproth would come knocking on my door. After all, who were you anonymous people to sit in judgment of yours truly.

I was getting ready to toss in the towel and to say the hell with this place and then I got that anonymous Klaproth message and well, let’s just say I laughed my ass off.

Then, after awhile, things became much easier.

I still remember the first C! dannye tossed my way as if it were yesterday. I dunno, when dannye took the time to C! something of mine it felt somehow more “special”.

Like many others before me, we had our ups and downs over the years but it never denigrated to name calling or getting personal. It was always about “the work”. If that means a subtle change in vocabulary here or a tweaking of the tone there, so be it. After all, it was “the work” that you leave behind for others to see and based on that, an opinion to be made.

As the years went on our relationship developed into what I would call a friendship born out of mutual respect. He also wrote a poem about me and even though he admitted it wasn’t what he considered his best work I still cherish it and tried to repay him in kind.

So my friend, I write this with a tear in my eye and a sadness in my heart for someone that I never officially met but certainly got to know and eventually love.

I offer up my last respects with some words from Mark Knopfler and his tune called “Stand Up Guy from the album Shangri-La, a fictional place from the novel Lost Horizon. The author described it as “a mystical, harmonious valley, gently guided from a lamasery, enclosed in the western end of the Kunlun Mountains. Shangri-La has become synonymous with any earthly paradise, and particularly a mythical Himalayan utopia — a permanently happy land, isolated from the outside world."

May we both find ourselves someplace similar someday.

There stands the bottle
Here’s to absent friends
All these bottles
Dead soldiers in the end
These days’ miracles
Don’t come falling from the sky
Raise your glasses to the doctor
To a stand up guy
To the doctor
A stand up guy.

One last thing, I’m not quite sure that Dannye was responsible for that Klaproth message that kept me here all these years later but for those of us who know him via E2, who else could it be?

Thanks for everything my friend.

I can say, without a second thought, that I never would have remained active on E2 beyond 2001 if it had not been for dannye. Everyone who knew him knew how absolutely relentlessly infuriating he could be. It also used to be said that a group of noders could not get together in real life without his name coming up. The truest element of a person's character is how real they are, how willing they are to be themselves and to not hide who they are, and how they do not change that character just to impress or attract other people. Danny was always very, very real.

That was the element that caused him to be infuriating and so much more.

When I first found this place I was bored, working nights in a theme park warehouse and needing to kill some time. I wrote and posted some complete crap, things that just jumped off the top of my head. Years later as a content editor and administrator here I would remind others that this was normal for anyone falling across a seemingly random website that asked for content. In those early days I would have things killed without comment. I would receive nasty private messages from self-righteous editors. This didn't make me want to contribute to the site in a meaningful way. Why would it? The only member of the staff here who saw what I was doing and understood was dannye. We exchanged a lot of messages in those days, with him pointing out to me that he could see from the half-assed crap I was posting that I was capable of much more. I knew I was, but the point was that I needed to have a reason to actually contribute content to a site that disrespected me right out of the starting gate.

I wouldn't have minded being told what I was posting was sub-par. I knew it was. I didn't care. Then along came dannye, an administrator in those days, and he gave me a reason to start posting things that mattered.

The thing was, dannye challenged you. And he genuinely cared about this website. He would tell you straight up how he felt about you as well as how he felt about some shit you just posted. He could insult you and everything you believed in, and I'm pretty sure most of the time he did it to see how you would react.

In 2006 we got into the online equivalent of a drunken brawl. It was on June 6th of 2006, which I remember because it was the annual anniversary of my death in 1994. Every year on that night I would get blindingly drunk. Usually I'd stay to myself, but that night was in the midst of a rather awful time in my personal life and I came on E2 and decided to pick a fight with dannye. That was the last June 6th I celebrated by getting drunk. We didn't talk again for over a year and at the urging of another noder I apologized. He told me not to worry about it and we moved on. Then he suggested I get out of the politics game, not because we so strongly disagreed with each other's views, but because, he said, I had more important things to focus on.

He was right on that count. My intensive mental and emotional involvement in the political goings on in this country and the world frustrated me and drained my energy from my that which had become my life's work. My work over the years with troubled people, which intensified with my involvement in this website, requires my full energy and attention. Since I started working for a living with troubled teen girls in 2005, the picture has slowly come into focus.

Never doubt that dannye cared a great deal for this website, its content and its people. If the defenses built into his infamous personality hadn't protected him, he never would have survived so many years here as one of its most regular patrons. He will most certainly be missed. I know I will miss him. Every time I posted something here there was always the thought in the back of my head, "I wonder if dannye will be cool with this one?" That was because what he thought did matter. And dannye's C!s were always the ones that meant the most to me.

Row, row, row your boat.

Everything2 is truly a family. Sad sometimes it takes the passing of many of us consider a patriarch to remember that but truly sometimes we need to be brought together. Seeing everyones names and memories come together reminds me of a virtual bonfire of sorts. But what everyone writes is true, Dannye was the person that may of pissed you off really quickly but he was also the one that supported you when you were a new or experienced noder. 

Recently I was fortunate to check off my list spending time with a noder that I think of very highly, and we did talk about Dannye and his contributions to the site. We mentioned the positives and negatives about our interactions with him. I was more reminded that he was a much better person then he came off which then digging back into the history of my brain I did realize yes I had those moments too and I can't forget them. I never thought a website would have such an impact on my life and surroundings - but looking around people I more recently see most are noders. Funny how life has it's ways of bring people together but no regrets.

This site as much as many wouldn't want to admit it has shaped many lives, and continues too. Dannye's legacy will live on our hearts are saddened by his loss but he enstiled in us much to carry forward. Farewell Dannye and  Godspeed.

Well, shit.

I last posted a node in 2009. My life has changed a lot since then, E2 always having a lasting effect with fellow noders popping up in my facebook stream. It was Oolong's post that alerted me to the passing of dannye.

I never met dannye, he featured heavily through my early noding, correcting and the occasional nuking. Those nukes still sting. I raised my personal bar and there was less nukes from a noder that I feared and admired. I still have the postcard he sent me, it is somewhere in a box that has travelled around the world.

I doubt I will be back on E2 as much as I was in the past but I am compelled to return. I sit here, the familiar layout in front of me, the computer glare reflecting on glasses and the beer can beside me. An American beer raised to the memory of a man who believed strongly enough in his ideals to say what he thought sometime regardless of the consequences or ego. He would have preferred a whiskey, I am not keen on whiskey. So, a cheap American beer, bought in London, drunk by an Australian who is trying not to cry, it is.

I have one regret, that I never contacted Dannye outside of E2. Time renew some old acquaintances, I think. Life is too short to hide from the ghosts of LPM past.

Good bye, dannye.

So what do you do when one of your favourite old nemeses kicks it? Do you stay diplomatically silent and just nod at the headstone? Do you dance on a grave that hasn't even been watered yet? Do you pour a libation of something just a little bit precious?

Like many people here I had a complex relationship with dannye. Did I learn from him? Sure, sometimes too much. Did he set an example? Sure, he set an example of how your writing standards should improve with time. Did he piss me off? Oh hell yeah. Did I often wish that the catbox would crack open and demons would smother him in whatever flavour of unfiltered nodegel is reserved for the wrathful? Hallelujah and amen! Do I think that he was a rotten influence on people on the site? Ask me in private. I no longer have a public opinion as we no longer have a quarrel in the public sphere. It's over, you know. Life has its way of settling these things with a certain finality. And when it's over it's OVER. You're wasting your time hating on the dead and it makes you smaller as a person. Besides, I don't believe in an afterlife. What people leave behind are lessons and examples and you can take them and apply them as you see fit. Sic transit odium.

He probably nuked your shit. He probably nuked my shit. He probably nuked my shit. He probably nuked my shit. Let's leave the emphasis there. His bedside manner sucked but his diagnosis was usually spot on, and when it said "shit" it probably was shit. Kinda like House. He had a nose for suckage and I learned a lot about recognising it for what it was. Perhaps a bit unfortunately I adopted his style without having his gift for appealing to people even as he pounded holy noding righteousness into them. Oh well, that's my failing, not his.

Like me, most of us who signed up before 2005 met dannye through his efforts as a fightin', smitin' editor. And some people never manged to see him as more than that. They should have looked a bit closer. It took only one, simple thing to turn him from belligerent node murderer to cantankerous bunny rabbit: He just had to be persuaded that you cared about the site. A lot of the rude bluster was really his version of standing on the porch with a shotgun while you walked his daughter to the car. Some of it, I confess, always gave me a case of the what-the-fucks so I just stayed somewhere where I could duck in a hurry. Those who came a lot later may never understand these things. You had to be there.

It was all quite collegial for a while. We never got together since I moved away from the Midsouth in 2002 and only ever passed through Little Rock once in my life after that. We did talk on the phone, several times and usually around midnight while we were both on bones's staff. I think his number ended in 0059. Why I should remember that I do not know. A genial time was had by all, far more than with most noders I spoke with. Then stuff happened and a lot changed at the top but we continued in that fairly friendly vein until the time he got fired. I was actually on sabbatical at the time so I was a bit surprised, and not surprised at the same time.

So it came that by 2006 our roles had changed and it was a matter of him being out and my being on the ascendancy in the management scheme. I know he hated it most of the time but he was not the sort to sulk at the expense of the job getting done. He had our ear, both dann's and mine, and used it quite frequently. For the longest time he was hardly irrelevant because we would not spurn a valid opinion from a smart, experienced head even if that head's style was not compatible with what we wanted from the staff. He also had his finger on the pulse of a particular segment of the noderbase, one that was reluctant to engage the management as it was. If we wanted to know what the word was in those circles we'd ask dannye, if he hadn't already volunteered his input.

The direction and the tone of the site changed more and more, and less and less to dannye's liking. I confess that our exchanges got a bit old and less constructive every year. In the end I figure he made a lousy outsider in the way reserved for those who have been out of power for a long time but retain a fixed notion of how things ought to be and never lose their objective. At one point, on one of the increasingly frequent occasions on which he was wildly and offensively mistaken, he landed on my ignore list. It was necessary for my peace of mind, if nothing else. I don't think he was pissed off as much as disappointed that he lost the ear of the Powers That Be. Perhaps it pained him to think he was considered less relevant. Maybe he didn't give a hoot because he thought he was doing good anyway. I don't know. I never saw it as a question of ego, mine or his, and I don't think that he did either. We'd just become incompatible as conversants.

I had him on ignore for, I don't know, two and a half, three years? We would still trade the odd C! nonetheless because good noding is good noding and neither of us would let personal differences stand in the way of recognising it.

I check my ignore list every few months to make sure that I'm not ignoring the fled and the, well, dead. He never reciprocated and for the last year or so I've been virtually silent in public so no one who had me on ignore would know the difference. Today I went to the list to remove the dead. Well, guess what.


You are being ignored by: dannye

If that won't make me laugh out loud and head to the fridge for another beer in your honour, I do not know what will. Rest easy, you old bastard. At least until I get there. You can only ignore me for so much of eternity and then we'll see who has the last laugh. But, really, what did I expect from a guy who writes his own obituary?

Here's to bygones.

------------------------------------------


He's a poet, he's a picker, he's a prophet, he's a pusher
He's a pligrim and a preacher and a problem when he's stoned
He's a walking contradiction, plartly truth and partly fiction
Taking every wrong direction on his lonely way back home

Kris Kristofferson - The Pilgrim

A walking contradiction, yep, that fits.

When I recall Dannye and I will, I will always think about him in terms of music. Reading his work here, talking to him through brief messages-- I always equated him with music. The band he played in, the music he loved -and hell yes, the music he hated. His writing always seemed to have a soundtrack- just like the movies he wrote about. Maybe it is because we both spent a lot of time in the South, maybe because we listened to similar music. Maybe just cos. But no matter what I will miss him. Here and in the broader sense. He was a stubborn narrow minded SOB. But, as so many said -he was our SOB . He still is, and will always be our SOB.

"This is the night of the expanding man
I take one last drag, As I approach the stand
I cried when I wrote this song,
Sue me if I play too long
This brother is free, I'll be what I want to be..."

Deacon blues - Steely Dan

Lastly there is this-
When we die, and folks we know gather to remember us, how do you want to be remembered?
When your friends/enemies/loved ones share their thoughts- what would be the best you can hope for?

How about this? We are better people for knowing him.
Dannye. Nice knowing you.

In some other time, a thousand miles away,
I played a thousand times before
And like pathetic stars, the truck stops and the rock club walls
I always knew, You saw them too,
But you never will again
Late -Elliot Smith - Ben Folds




Far be it for me to say what I think dannye would have wanted to be written about him. Worse would be for me to create something and submit it as "what I think he would want."

If there is a thing to know after you die, our dannye now knows it and nothing I can say can change that or add to it, or take from it. It is. Simply.

But as we know, definitely, there is life after death. For dannye is gone and we are still living.

As it will be for each of us.

I hope.






Inevitably the stuff you write about losing someone is stuff you write about losing someone. That makes it writing about yourself because at the end of it maybe all you can do is write about your loss. No one alive is good at saying what it's like to die. We don't know what he went through, but we hope with every fiber of our soul that it wasn't awful. Because Danny just paid the cover-charge to life that we all will pay.






From now on everything I write will be post-dannye. No more msg comments from him. No more C!s. No more corrected misspellings.

None of my words will enter his mind. Nothing I say will be subject to his processing and opinion.

There may be another out there who would substitute, but he won't be "our" dannye. There was ever only one.






When I think about dannye I think about manly things. I think about approaching this world as a male of the species with specific boy-indicators and viewpoints and positions. I think about an approach to the world subject to all the confusion and ridicule and frustration men live through.

I consider the many privileges enabled simply by male birth - those we truly have and those we believe we have. Fictional truths. The fallacy in fact. Wanting power we could inherit explicitly by being right. To be right, in public, awarded the status and position of those who are not wrong.

I think about our dannye - OUR dannye and not some poser - and how I am exactly the same person, a decade-plus-some younger (which seems to be an ever smaller number as I grow older), an easterner rather than a southerner, an liberal-leaning centrist rather than a ever-so-slightly left leaning conservative (I offer Satan Sucks as evidence), a technologist rather than a humanist, agnostic rather than well, probably agnostic, less likely to growl. Equally likely to smile. Equally desirous of love and approval. Therefore absolutely identical in all respects.

Maybe that's why all our communication was civil and supportive. We are cleaved from the same soul but wrapped ourselves in different skin. But we are part of a self-selected group, visiting with each other daily for many years. It took one, to know one.

We could have been brothers. We are.






Evidence is that it was important for him to be dannye. He had an internalized version of himself that what critical to maintain. Examples of this in modern literature/media would be Walter White or Tony Soprano or James T Kirk or to get into our mutually favorite author, Mark Helprin, Peter Lake or Harry Copeland. It's what happens to some of us that in the quest for some sense of purity and success we refine a self image from nothingness and strive to become it. Because we are imperfect beings, that golden, purified image seems the pinnacle of godliness to us - the apex of superhuman morality and goodness and value - and we cannot understand and choose not to put energy into calculation of why it is not that to everyone. We can't fathom how we are not appreciated for being on the path to that human goodness. How is it that someone could disagree with our behavior as we walk the path to what is clearly the blatant glaring purity of heroic human existence?

Because the value of a man - indeed our value as men to ourselves - is in what we can provide and is evidenced by the health and success of those we have cared for.

We are all flawed, each of us, even as we strive to become flawless. As the philosophers have said, it's the trying, not the attainment, that counts.

That's what's true - right?






dannye wanted the best for e2 and its inhabitants. He wanted for E2 to be on a path to greatness, and its people to be inspired to attain better things. The very idea sounds silly to internet-age people. The internet is infinitely available, and therefore trivial to us who have it in our pockets on our phones, on our iPads in bed, in our bluetooth headsets as we walk city streets, in our cars, on our TVs. It is everywhere, so its value is diluted infinitely. And we treat it as such. To many E2 is a place to blather or interact, or be commodious, or to exert our will on others. But to dannye, who saw the internet and E2 as an important resource, it was impossible not to try for some version of heroism. How could it be trivial, this thing that connected us? How could people with so much innate talent allow themselves to be undermined by the innate chaos of the internet? Isn't life about striving in the face of adversity? Isn't this just one more hill? Isn't it the same challenge in different clothes?

How could we therefore not try to improve it and ourselves at each opportunity?

As a guy who grew up with the internet, I never held out much hope for it. To me the internet is chaos. And if there is any aspiration to E2, it was to maintain a chaotic position within the chaos. And thus he brought forward to this bastion of trivial utterance the learned concept of raising the bar which any good professor would put before his students, both because he wanted it for himself, but also because he wanted to be an agent of improvement. It was how he could provide.

Some of us are born with the will to put energy into things. And some of us learn the hard way. Maybe the error we make, we fathers of children, is to think we are helping by not allowing others to learn their own hard way.

I find my own father's voice coming from my mouth sometimes. I heard it in dannye. And you will someday hear it from yourself.

"Ok, sure. But will you not try?"






These things are not truths. Only what dannye meant to me - and I say dannye and not Daniel Wildman, because I'm speaking of the electronic form. I did not know the man, only his imposition upon this electronic universe. And they are two different things.






So I wish for all to know that what I take from the electronic works of dannye is companionship, a direction, and genuine passion for writing. He was better at it than I am, more passionate. And he was much more passionate about this internet backwater we call E2. Of all of us he adopted it completely, shepherded it faithfully, right up to the last heartbeat.

Let it be known he was here.

Let him remain.


I would like to talk about fathers. I apologize to the mothers of the world in advance.

I became a father for the third time on October 2. Audrey Michelle Hale weighed 9 pounds, 4 ounces, was 21 inches tall, and is by all accounts a healthy, happy baby girl. Research indicates that 50% of all babies born in 2013 will live to see 100. The amount of parenting I will have to do is tremendous, to get her there, and not just get there but get there smart and kind and happy.

When you are a father, you learn that some things you do by instinct are good and right, and others must be tempered away by hard experience. When you are a father, you learn that it's all hard work, some of it unpleasant, most if it unappreciated, and all of it unglamorous. When you are a father, you learn to love your children for who they are and not who you want them to be, and to recognize the difference. And most of all, when you are a father, you learn that your main job is to raise your children to not need fathers anymore, and what's more to become fathers themselves, to pay forward that hard work and hard experience and hard-earned knowledge into .. well, who knows what, but that's never stopped us before.

Now that I'm a father, I think of my own father constantly, how he's guided me in imperceptible ways, what he's done for me that I never gave a second thought to, and then when he is around Audrey and Sophia and Grayson I see him putting on old hats he hasn't worn in years, and dusting off new tricks he's learned, and then I think of his father, my grandfather, and his father, and all of the fathers who got me here, and not just get here but get here hopefully smart and hopefully kind, but certainly happy.

They're gone now, those fathers, but that is the wonderful thing about fathering - even when they're gone they leave themselves behind in every thing they've touched and loved, and when we need help we know where to find them again, if we just look hard enough.

I hope when the day comes that Audrey loses her father that she feels the same way about me that I do about Danny - that he was what we needed, and that he loved us, and that he was a wonderful father.

My favorite memory of hanging with dannye.

The Kim Li Diaries

Man, at first, we went head-to-head a lot, but I think it's awesome that we could come together and make something silly and fun--and the bits dannye did fucking killed me.

I only talked with dannye infrequently in the last 12 or so years, but the man left an impression and he will be missed.

What a wit we have lost.

I haven't written about dannye until now because it took me a while to gather my thoughts (and also because I've been very, very busy).

Anyway, here's the secret about Danny...

If you were confrontational with him, he would invariably by at least twice as confrontational back to you. But at the same time, if you were kind to him, he would be at least twice as kind back to you. To me, that was Danny in a nutshell. He escalated.

Now I will grant you that more often than not, the confrontation began with Danny himself; this was his flaw. Like many others, in my early days on this site I earned myself a lifetime membership in the Club of People Whose First Writeup Was Deleted By Dannye. Given the diversity of people on this site, that may be the single biggest "usergroup" of them all.

Back in those days, we still had Klaproth, and moreover Klaproth's messages did not identify which editor killed your writeup. But Danny was not one to shy away from taking credit for his kills, so after the Klaproth message I immediately got a message from him:

dannye says We have enough crap like this on the site already. Come back when you have something intelligent to say. Thanks.

Now I was just as shocked and appalled as anyone else would have been, but by nature I'm pretty careful with how I talk to authority figures, especially ones I don't know, so I instinctively responded with caution:

mauler says Sorry! I am new here. I'll try to do better next time.

Whereupon dannye replied:

dannye says Don't worry about it. Everyone messes up here at the beginning. I did too. Read some of the other writeups already on the site to see what we expect (especially those with a C!). You'll get the hang of it soon enough. Let me know if you have any questions.

Ever since then, my inbox was filled with nothing but kind words from Danny, praising my writeups, thanking me for suggestions I made on his writeups, offering friendly advice on how to improve my writing, etc. And I have to say, not all of the praise he gave me was deserved. For example, Danny was always a sucker for any writeup about baseball or golf, so I got a lot of praise and C!s from him on writeups that were not really all that well-written.

That said, I'm not blind. I definitely saw how vicious Danny could be in the catbox, and I can only imagine what he might have said to people in private messages. My own approach to dealing with people could not have been more different than his, and we certainly had our disagreements about politics and about editorial matters during the years we served together on staff here at E2. Once in a while I couldn't resist throwing a snarky comment his way about the state of American politics, at which time he would invariably hurl a political comment at least twice as snarky back at me.

But on the whole I always addressed him with politeness and what I got in return was nothing but kindness, encouragement, and even solicitousness.

I understand why other people responded to him differently, and it's unfortunate that Danny always made the other person have to be the one to turn the other cheek first, so to speak, but my point is that for me, Danny was an extreme object lesson in treating others how you want to be treated. Basically, if you said one nice word to him, he turned into a puppy.

Now, here's the other thing about Danny.

He loved E2.

In fact, he loved E2 more than anyone else has loved E2. Now there are a lot of other people who loved E2 to a ridiculous extent, and devoted crazy amounts of time to the site (I could list all the familiar names, but I won't). But all of those people - every single one - eventually left the site or, even if they are still around, took at least one or two lengthy breaks from E2. But as far as I can tell from server logs and such, not only did Danny write 979 writeups here that survived (and close to 2000 if you count the ones he pruned), but he logged into the site almost every day for 14 years without any significant hiatus from the site, and not only read almost every new writeup, but also gave feedback on many of them. And despite his misgivings about the direction of the site in recent years, which he often stated in the catbox, he never gave up on E2, and kept coming back until the very day he died.

And therein lies the most moving part of all. This was a man who loved Everything2 so much, that he took time away from his last few days with his beloved family to compose a farewell writeup to post on this site and explain to his wife how to post it. He thought we all deserved a proper farewell. I'm not sure we really did, in the end, but I am grateful nonetheless.

So regardless of what you thought of Danny, and you are certainly entitled to your thoughts about Danny, I think it's safe to say that nobody ever loved this place more than he did, and in all likelihood nobody ever will.

Unlike many others, I can't say that I knew dannye well. I saw his name on the catbox often, but I can't recall any significant conversations with him in the catbox. Of course, like many others, he commented and sent me feedback on a few of my writeups via private message and I can say without a doubt that following his advice improved those writeups.

However, his language skills (which others have praised) are not what moved me to write him an eulogy of sorts. Neither are his roles as a father, husband and friend because I never had the pleasure of witnessing them. My motivation comes from two sources: the impact he had on e2 and how much of it was "hidden".

From what I can see, dannye loved this place and wanted the best for e2 and its members. I read people thanking him for his severe and honest feedback; for his commitment to quality, for all his writeups. I really had no idea of how extensive his presence was. Dannye's work in e2 reminds me of that man who planted entire fields of tulips, a few per day, every day. Today, those fields are marvelous displays of nature and more importantly, the living proof that small and consistent efforts lead to immensely grand results. I never knew dannye well, but his fields of tulips attest to years and years of commitment.

It also happened behind the scenes. If it wasn't for others' eulogies, maybe I would never have imagined that he was as valuable a critic as you praise him to be. It wasn't done for recognition or fame. It was for what he believed in, for a greater good. It was what needed to be done. I highly respect that.


I'm not really afraid of dying. I'm afraid of dying alone and forgotten. I want to create something that will live after I'm dead and dannye is an example of that. Even if I didn't know him, his presence seems to be big enough (and his absence hard enough) to touch a stranger like me. For this, I thank you, dannye.

I only have 8 messages from you and the last ones were wondering if I'd include Tecate in my mexican beers writeup. I'm truly sorry that life got in my way and I couldn't finish it on time for you to read it. But if there's a heaven, I'm sure you'll have plenty of beers to taste and a far better sunset to enjoy them.

Thank you, old man.

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